Local researchers have benefitted from Michael Levitt’s discoveries

“Anyone doing structural biology at UB – and especially scientists in UB’s Department of Structural Biology, based in the Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute—has been influenced by that work.”

Ram Samudrala, PhD, Professor and chief, Division of Bioinformatics

UB Department of Biomedical informatics

BUFFALO, N.Y. — Michael Levitt, a 2013 winner of the Nobel
Prize in Chemistry, isn’t Swedish but he began his speech at
the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm like this:

“I start in Swedish to prove that I can still learn
something 45 years after doing the work that brought me
here.”

On May 2, scientists, students and interested community members
will hear about that work, which he is still passionately pursuing,
when Levitt, a Stanford University School of Medicine biophysicist
and professor of structural biology, gives the O.P. Jones Lecture
at the University at Buffalo.

Free and open to the public, it takes place at 3:30 p.m. in
Butler Auditorium, 150 Farber Hall, on UB’s South Campus.

The talk is sponsored by the UB Clinical and Translational
Science Institute (CTSI) and the Department of Biomedical
Informatics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical
Sciences at UB. It is part of the CTSI Science Seminar series.

Levitt shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Martin
Karplus, PhD, of the University of Strasbourg and Harvard
University, and Arieh Warshel, PhD, of the University of Southern
California.

He said that the work that ultimately resulted in the Nobel
Prize started back in 1967. “The simplifications used then,
at the dawn of the age of computational structural biology, were
mandated by computers that were almost a billion times less
cost-effective than those we use today,” he explained.

While Levitt’s talk, titled “The Birth and Future of
Multiscale Modeling of Macromolecules” is geared to a
scientific audience, his contributions to science have had a
dramatic effect on a broad range of fields, from drug development
to materials science.

Buffalo-based scientists, in particular, have drawn on
Levitt’s advances, according to Ram Samudrala, PhD, professor
and chief, Division of Bioinformatics in the UB Department of
Biomedical Informatics.

“In a general sense, the Nobel Prize that Levitt won was
for being one of the first to do multiscale modeling of complex
chemical systems, such as proteins and nucleic acids,”
Samudrala said. “It launched the field of computational
structural biology. That work has influenced several generations of
scientists who, in turn, have influenced others. Anyone doing
structural biology at UB – and especially scientists in
UB’s Department of Structural Biology, based in the
Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute—has been
influenced by that work.”

“These same multiscale models have become increasingly
popular in applications that range from simulation of atomic
protein motion to protein folding and explanation of enzyme
catalysis,” Levitt explained. “In this talk, I describe
the originals of computational structural biology and then go on to
show some of the most exciting current and future
applications.”

The achievement for which Levitt and his colleagues were awarded
the Nobel had to do with techniques they developed to make
Newton’s classical physics work side by side with quantum
physics. They applied this to the computational modeling of large
molecules, a huge advance that allowed scientists for the first
time to be able to draw on both types of physics when simulating,
for example, how a drug couples to its target protein.